Processes and consequences of professionalisation in sports clubs

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Torsten Schlesinger
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450804578

Sports clubs play a crucial role for regular sports activities of the population. Thus, sports clubs represent an important pillar to promote sport and physical activity and fulfil important societal functions. At the same time, sports clubs are confronted with manifold challenges related to changes in society and developments in modern sport. Therefore, sports clubs increasingly tend to implement paid work and use management tools from business to address these problems. These organisational developments can be defined as professionalisation. Aside from existing studies on determinants for professionalisation at the organisational level (e.g. size, resources), there is a lack of evidence regarding professionalisation processes in sports clubs. Furthermore, there are few studies that analyse the extent professionalisation in sports clubs leads to unintended consequences, such as over-formalisation or a decrease in volunteering. Thus, our study aims to (1) comprehensively understand professionalisation as a transformative process including the underlying decision making, and (2) analyse corresponding consequences of professionalisation in terms of solving organisational problems, improving performance, changing organisational logics and contributing to socio-political functions.In order to address these research issues, we use a multilevel analytical framework combined with a processual approach that focuses on decision making in sports clubs. In order to get in-depth insights into organisational decision-making processes, we apply a multiple case study design and select 10 sports clubs each in Switzerland and in Germany that have just carried out a professionalisation process. We follow a multi-dimensional approach of professionalisation (Ruoranen et al., 2016) and aim to consider different forms of professionalisation when selecting the cases, for example establishment of a club office, employment of paid staff, introduction of specific programmes. We foresee the use of multiple sources of data collection to reconstruct the complexity of professionalisation processes within sports clubs: documentary analyses, interviews with decision makers in the club, focus groups with selected club members. The interviews and documents will be analysed using qualitative content analysis and all collected data will combined to develop a comprehensive map of the process of professionalisation in each club.Our study provide insight into the extent transformation of sports clubs to more business-like organisations leads to problem solving and performance improvement, and proceeds with unintended consequences. Thus, the study may provide an innovative contribution for Third Sector research as well as sport organisation research. This will help balance the future development of the sports club landscape in Germany and Switzerland and secure its important role in regular sports activities for the population as well as the broader contribution to public welfare.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Siegfried Nagel